He quickly entered the code, stopping the explosion.
“Gill! I’m so happy to see you again,” she exclaimed, smiling from all her hearts. “Are you all right?”
“I’m… fine,” he babbled, surprised by her question, realizing from her looks that she had no idea she was dead. The feeling of guilt overwhelmed him again, forcing him to avoid the effusive wave in her eyes.
“You don’t look so well,” she noticed in a worried voice. “What happened?” Then she looked around, confounded. “What is this place? Why aren’t you connected to Uralia?”
“Connected? But—”
“Gill, I had an awful dream,” she interrupted him. “I dreamed I was dead. That Uralia was destroyed!”
“Errr, I’ve… I have some bad news,” he stuttered. “You know, your dream—”
“It wasn’t a dream,” she realized, horrified, looking at her hands as if they weren’t hers.
“What happened to me?”
“I’m so sorry!”
“Forbat,” she remembered. “I’m… dead.”
There was an icy silence; Gill didn’t know what to say. He wanted to encourage her, to find some comforting words to make her situation easier, but what can you honestly say to someone who just realized she’s dead—and moreover, because of you?
“You woke up my avatar!” she exclaimed. Sandara not only wasn’t smiling anymore, but she was throwing murderous glares.
“I… I ‘asked’ Ugo to wake you up,” he said in one breath.
“Noo!” she wailed. “How could you do this to me? You allied with the monster to wake me to a hideous life?”
“Please let me explain,” he begged her.
“What’s left to be explained? You’re… you’re no better than Ugo,” she said, and she turned around to avoid looking in his eyes. Sandara started to walk to a patch of trees at the edge of the meadow, her temples wet with tears.
“Sandara! I need your help!”
“Leave me alone!” she burst angrily. “I’m going to erase myself!”
“Sandara!” he shouted madly after her. “You have to stop Ugo! Otherwise, he’s going to expand!”
The female stopped on her feet, shaking, and Gill guessed more than he saw the huge effort she had to make to turn back, if only to throw him another murderous glare.
“Don’t you understand that I’ve become a monster, just like him? I don’t want to live this way! I don’t want you to see me… like this.”
“You know something? You’re not changed like Ugo!” he said, finally meeting her eyes.
“How do you know that?” she asked with an icy inflection.
“I know because… because I know it! I know you better than you think! Do you believe that a poor death could break all the good things in you? Anyone else would have gladly accepted Kaura’s compromise, but look how mad you are! You’re the same Sandara I’ve dreamed again and again since I first met you, when you ordered your guards to torture me, remember?”
He thought he saw a shadow of a smile passing like a cloud on her face, quickly replaced by a grimace of suffering.
“Gill, there’s no point in stopping me. If I don’t delete myself now, it will be harder later.”
“Sandara, you can’t abandon me now. You’re the fighter! Without you, the Sigian world is lost!”
“So this is the world for which you were about to abandon Uralia in the claws of the monster! I guess I’m finally about to hear the tragic story that made Baila spy how you scratch your tail?”
Ignoring her sarcasm, Gill started to tell his incredible adventures, from the discovery of the Sigian skeletons buried in a sandy bank on Sigarion up to how he blackmailed the abomination to wake her from the dead. And slowly, as he was speaking, he saw her anger giving way to astonishment. Playful sparkles reignited the flame in her beautiful eyes.
“Why didn’t you tell me about the bracelet until now?” she asked him, with a trace of reproach, as soon as he finished his story.
“I told you already—it wasn’t my secret.”
“And now that I’m dead, you have more trust in me?” she teased him shamelessly.
“No,” Gill said, returning her irony. “But now you have to stop Ugo,” he told her gently.
“You’re kidding, right?” She started to panic, realizing that Gill had no shadow of intent to joke. “He’s an architect, and I can barely design a stone. It will take me years to do what he can create in the twitch of a tail.”
“You mean I’m an architect?”
“No, but—”
“And I defeated him. Sandara, do you have any idea why Ugo always won the virtual fights?”
“He’s the best strategist!”
“Wrong! He won because he was motivated to beat everybody. Your folk took the championships as a fun game, while he saw the perfect chance to become a god!”
Gill realized from her looks that Sandara wasn’t too convinced by his arguments. He sighed, painfully aware of how little time he had to prepare her for battle. Even the most intuitive Guk routine-aroma harmonics couldn’t be mastered without rigorous training.
In a few words, he tried to explain the basic philosophy, without hoping, however, that the grah female understood anything.
“Sandara, you have to focus on your weapons.”
“What weapons do I have against Ugo?” she asked incredulously.
“Well, first, we both know what he plans to do: prevent me from meeting the aliens. Then, you’re dead, like him. I know that at first glance it doesn’t look like much, but you—”
“Have no limitations,” she finished. “I don’t have chains of genetic algorithms like him.”
“See? Very good—you’re starting to think Guk.”
“I wonder how’s that going to help.”
“I’m afraid you have to find out yourself,” he told her, sorrowful. “I can’t enter your world.”
“I got it,” she sighed, lowering her eyes.
Sandara didn’t say anything because there was nothing more to say. She didn’t implore him to stay and help her, even though she wished more than anything that he could. She realized that the reasons that gave him the strength to fight and reach this far became hers also. And then she understood her secret weapon: not that she was dead and thus free from the limitations of a physical body, but that she loved him and was ready to do anything for him. Love and logic never walked tail-to-tail—and they won’t this time, either, she thought, and she decided not to anguish in vain about Ugo’s perceived superiority. She looked Gill in his eyes to make him understand that she was aware of his expectations and had no intention of proving anything less to him.
“You’re right,” she said, smiling. “You’re right, as usual—it’s my fight.”
Gill read the determination in her eyes and knew that Ugo would finally meet his match.
“Listen, I don’t think it’s a bright idea to count on Ugo to drive you to the aliens in this ship,” she said. “Better take the Grammian ship, and I’ll make sure he won’t attack you.”
“I’ll do it.”
“But before you leave, promise me one thing.”
“Anything!” he said, smiling broadly.
“Promise that after the end of the madness, you’ll let me delete myself.”
“You really have to do this?”
“Gill! I’m surprised to hear such a question from you,” she reproached him, pretending she didn’t get the reason for his unhappiness.
“All right, I promise,” he sighed.